Various network operators offer national and international roaming to their subscribers by establishing roaming coverage worldwide. These network operators generate majority of roaming revenue from their outbound roamers traveling to different visited networks. The outbound roamers of a home network performing call and non-call related activities (e.g., Value Added Services (VASs)) in any of these visited networks eventually result in increasing outbound roaming revenue for the home network operator.
In one technique of providing outbound roaming, the home network operator uses Customized Application for Mobile network Enhanced Logic (CAMEL) service. The CAMEL service allows the home network operator to provide its prepaid outbound roamers at a visited network with the home network, like Mobile Originated (MO) calls and messages experience. Further, the CAMEL service facilitates real time billing and correct deduction of balance from outbound roamer's prepaid account. The home network operator is able to provision retail billing of its outbound roamers in real time, instead of waiting for Transferred Accounting Procedure (TAP) records from the visited network. In case the home network wishes to restrict outbound roamer's services in the visited network, it can apply Operator Determined Barring (ODB) on calls and messages of the outbound roamer while he is in the visited network. However the ODB may fail for outbound roamers with premium numbers as these numbers may often vary. The CAMEL service allows the home network operator to restrict the outbound roamer's calls and messages in real time and thus facilitate fraud control.
Furthermore, the CAMEL service also allows network operators to cater to their postpaid outbound roamers for Virtual Home Environment (VHE) services such as home short code, home dialing experience and Virtual Private Network (VPN) services. Many network operators enable CAMEL support for both prepaid and postpaid outbound roaming. CAMEL service is also useful for selective home routing or least cost routing of calls, Calling Line Identification (CLI) delivery, or a third party partner carrier routing of calls from the outbound roamer. In this case, the outbound roamer's call can be selectively routed back to his home network or a partner network, based on a called number and a calling network and their associated tariff (e.g. termination charge at called number network).
However, in order to avail one or more of the above mentioned benefits of CAMEL service generally both the home network and visited networks are required to support CAMEL protocol in their networks. In some cases they are also required to establish CAMEL agreements with each other—a process which is time consuming and introduces delay and friction into the international roaming business.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art of a system, a method, and a computer product, which allows prepaid and postpaid outbound roamers of a home network to roam in visited networks even when either the home network or visited networks do not support CAMEL (or Intelligent Network (IN)) protocol or they do not have a CAMEL (or IN) agreement with each other.